A campaign trail of lies
We expect a certain degree of innocuous duplicity when it comes to most democratic political leadership campaigns. Many of us first learned this back in middle school, when wouldbe class presidents would promise weekly pizza lunches and delayed morning classes, even though there was no money for free lunches and no precedent for a snotty 13-year-old kid to change the bell time from 8:30 a. m. to 10 a. m. Nevertheless, kids would vote for the pie- loving, laterising frontrunner anyway, because they want to believe that his promises could actually come true, and also because they share a common loathing for the insufferable drama kids who take over the west stairwell each afternoon.
As we enter adulthood, these campaign promises become slightly less trifling, though not necessarily any less implausible: they include the Liberal government’s pledge of hundreds of millions of dollars in new spending, while keeping to “modest” $ 10- billion deficits, or the Alberta NDP’s promise to balance the books by 2018-19 ( a target it has recently revised) amid falling oil prices and a plethora of new infrastructure projects. We get caught up in the rhetoric and the momentum of these campaign promises, and we placate ourselves with the notion that as long as the government is heading in the right direction, the details will sort themselves out later.
I have no choice but to believe that this type of psychological self- mollification is the only reason why the supporters of U. S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump haven’t pressed their manic leader on his many objectively impossible campaign pledges. Yes, a handful of these promises — such as to build a wall along the border with Mexico and to ban all Muslims from coming into the United States — are hideously bigoted and racist, but for the most diehard of Trump fans, that’s hardly a reason to abandon their support. In fact, they likely constitute quite the opposite: Trump’s hard line against Muslims is seen as a step in the “right direction” to some, and as long as he’s willing to take a strong stand, well, the details will just have to sort themselves out later.
The problem is, of course, that these details will never sort themselves out. Unless someone drops the constitution in the toilet and the U.S. starts painting murals of dear leader on the sides of its federal buildings, America will simply not be able to prohibit Muslims from coming into the country — especially not the many Muslim- Americans who happen to be travelling abroad, a group that Trump has explicitly stated would be included in the ban. And even if the country did, theoretically, adopt some sort of totalitarian-esque prohibition of Muslims, how would border agents properly screen for an intangible and variable religious belief ? Is there a Muslim birthmark I’m not aware of ? Would migrants be forced to eat a strip of bacon at the border? But then, what about the Jews?
Trump’s position on Muslims isn’t the only one that falls apart when removed from the cosy confines of his imagination and afforded even the slightest real- world consideration. He contends that he will build a 1,900- mile wall along the border with Mexico and get the Mexican government to pay for it. But how will he convince Mexico to fork over the dough? How high of a wall are we talking? What happens when the wall needs repairs? And what will the U. S. do when illegal migrants still manage to slip into the country? Trump also says he will round up and deport 11-million undocumented migrants. But how will he track them? Will there be a snitch line? How will he move them — buses, army vehicles, commercial planes? How much will it cost? Will he break up families? And what will such a massive, sudden deportation of workers do to the U.S. economy?
These questions have no answers, of course, because Trump isn’t interested in evidence. He is, you’ll recall, the guy who was convinced President Barack Obama was really a Kenyan expat, even after Obama released his long- form birth certificate. Trump claimed vaccines cause autism during a September GOP primary debate. He says he saw footage of “thousands and thousands” of Muslims in Jersey City, N. J., cheering as the Twin Towers fell down in 2001, despite a complete dearth of evidence. He has turned his wild conspiracy theories into campaign promises, which are just as far- fetched as a 13- year- old promising to convince the principal to let his peers sleep for an extra hour every day. Yes, many of his positions are disgustingly bigoted, but they’re also irrefutably bananas.
Maybe the lesson here — at least, for this primary race, as well as for your middle school run for class president — is that the facts don’t matter. I say that less as an admission of nihilism than simply as an observation: Donald Trump is a conspiracy theorist, and for whatever reason, his conspiracies have found fertile ground in the Republican voting base. Outrage, refutations, denunciations and the presentation of facts have not, so far, derailed Trump’s support. But maybe a conspiracy theory or two might actually do the trick. After all, what’s good for the goose, right? So I ask, as a total sequitur: is Donald Trump secretly Muslim?
Maybe the lesson here is that facts don’t matter. Trump is a conspiracy theorist, and his conspiracies have found fertile ground in the Republican Party